Re: Vacuum Full (PG 8.1) - Urgent help needed - Cancel & transaction "liberation"

"Kevin Grittner" <Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> writes:
> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>> if you actually managed to start two services against the
>> same data directory, I hope you have a backup, you can restore
>> from.

> This is 8.1 under Windows, and he connected to a different database
> with each backend. He got errors writing the WAL files, and it
> apparently wouldn't let him start a second VACUUM on the other
> database. I'm hoping that the initial VACUUM (of the big database)
> can continue and the WAL problems will cycle out without corrupting
> anything. Is that overly optimistic?

Maybe, but if he doesn't have a recent backup then that's probably the
best thing to try. I'm not actually sure how he would've started two
standalone backends though --- there *is* an interlock against that,
just as there is for two postmasters in the same data directory.
Maybe if he was bullheaded enough to remove the lock file manually :-(

> Also, the
> "full-database vacuum" terminology seems too likely to be
> interpreted as VACUUM FULL for best results. Perhaps it's worth
> changing that to just "database vacuum" or "vacuum of the entire
> database"?

We did change that ...
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2008-12/msg00096.php

regards, tom lane